When the news broke that Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth had decided to call time on their marriage, the world was aghast.
Who would have thought that this notoriously volatile couple who lived under the endless scrutiny of the media wouldn’t have been able to settle into a quiet lifetime of gentle domesticity?
It was such a shock to us all.
And much has been made of the fact that their marriage barely cracked a year, but by celebrity standards that’s almost a decade – celebrities are like dogs, in that day is a week by human standards.
But who were the top five celebrity unions, in terms of brevity of their time spent in holy matrimony? Here are our picks:
Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock: 122 Days
Like Hemsworth’n’Cyrus Ms Anderson and Mr Rock had a tumultuous on-again-off-again relationship before deciding that would make a great basis for a marriage.
It lasted from July to November 2016, and rumour has it that the final straw for Rock was Anderson being in Borat and his fury at people going “my wife!” to him.
Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries: 72 Days
2011 saw the love affair between one of the planet’s rising stars of reality television and a basketball player who you know of purely because he was once briefly married to Kim Kardashian.
Like all great love stories the wedding got a two day E! special and featured eyewatering levels of product placement. Accusations that the whole thing was a publicity stunt were not helped when the marriage didn’t crack three months.
Drew Barrymore and Jeremy Thomas: 39 Days
She was a 19 year old actress with a wild streak; he was a 32 year old who owned a bar in LA and that she’d known for a month and a half. What a love story!
That 1994 dalliance was the shortest of her three marriages, beaten by her 2001 marriage to comedian Tom Green (163 days) and her 2012 marriage to art consultant Will Kopelman (slightly over four years).
Carmen Electra and Dennis Rodman: 9 Days
Kardashian and Humphries weren’t the first TV personality/sportsdude couple to briefly try marriage on for size and decide to return it: the MTV star and the colourful basketball fellow lasted a bit over a week when they tied the knot in Las Vegas in 1998 before getting an annulment.
She certainly took things more seriously the next time around, marrying Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro as part of a reality series called ‘Til Death Do Us Part: Carmen and Dave. The marriage lasted a bit under three years.
And the reigning champion remains…
Britney Spears and Jason Alexander: 55 Smash Hours
Sadly, this wasn’t Jason Alexander from Seinfeld: this was a childhood friend of Britney’s of the same name, who she wed in a Vegas quickie ceremony in 2004.
And really, we should have realised then that maybe, just maybe, clinging to one of the few people she might have thought she could trust was a massive cry for help from a person under enormous sanity-eroding pressure.
The marriage was annulled, and Britney never made an impulsive marriage again – except to the dancer Kevin Federline, who she wed three months after meeting.
So take heart, Miley, yours is not the shortest celebrity marriage. Maybe next time.